James Barrett and Gertrude Williams

I am not a Barrett, but my mother Eileen was. Her mother (my grandmother) Gertrude was Welsh from north Wales - Ruthin and her father (my grandfather) James was Irish or from an Irish family.

Here is Gertrude Williams, photo probably taken when she had moved to London and living in Southall - she seems to be in her mid twenties:

And here is James (Jimmy) Barrett about 19 years old in the Leinster Regiment (many from the Barrett family were in this Irish regiment- his father, uncle, brother in law, grandfather and great grand father!):

James Barrett was born in Greenwich, London in 1901, not in Ireland. He travelled over the world as a young man in the merchant navy, joined the army for 5 months - he obviously didn't like it- and joined the merchant navy again. My aunt gave me his passport which showed he travelled to these different places before the age of 22:

Montevideo, Uruguay

Rosario, Santa Fe', Argentina

River Plate, Argentina

Alexandria, Al Iskandariyah, Egypt

Not bad for those days! The family story goes that he hit his head while on a merchant ship and he spent a week in a coma in Germany. One of his voyages is incomplete when he was 20 years old, so this could be the reason and I know he ended up in hospital in his 40s with a mental illness that the family attributed to a brain tumour. He actually died from tuberculosis - confirmed through a postmortem without inquest. So this story is still unconfirmed.

Here he is again in a school photo taken when he was about 12 years old. He is in the front row, second from the left:

This was a garrison school (you can tell this by reading the board and the teachers wearing military uniform), probably in Farnborough, Hampshire, taken in 1913.

Here he is again, even younger, about 9 or 10 years old outside the family house in Aldershot or Farnborough with his brothers and sisters. In all he had 9 brothers and sisters. He was the second youngest and there was an age gap of 19 years between him and his eldest sibling, Mary. At the back is Amelia (Milly), Henry (who died in WW1), Hilda and at the front James (Jimmy) and Eileen (who my mother was named after who died in her early twenties).

He was with the Heavy Rescue Squad in WW2, which was an awful job. He would have had to dig in to houses that had been blown up to recover people who were alive or dead and make the buildings safe.

He died in 1949 at the age of 47.

My aunt remembers him as a jolly man who got on with everyone he met. The kind who would buy everyone in the pub a drink. My grandmother used to manage the money to make sure this didn't happen too often!